Page Experience Becomes a Ranking Factor on Google (May 2021)

Page Experience signals, as of May 2021, become a big factor to determine the ranking of a page on Google. Page Experience is the way visitors relate to a webpage (by clicking on it). The existing Page Experience signals are four namely: mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS, and no obstruction to content. So to these signals, Google will add Core Web Vitals as part of the Page Experience.

And these Core Web Vitals contain metrics that help Google understand the quality of user experience. They are Loading Time (Largest Contentful Paint), Interactivity (First Input Delay), and Visual Stability (Cumulative Layout Shift).

These metrics help to determine how interactive your page is, how secure it is, how stable, how mobile-friendly, and how fast it holds. All these combined factors focus on creating a superior user experience.

Feature in Top Stories without AMP

Another reason the page experience signals will be introduced is to enable non-AMP content showcase in the Top Stories for mobile. This will enable the site to draw in mobile traffic through the content, causing a change in the ranking of several sites. This is why we need to prepare and be ready for this massive change in the algorithm.

Mobile First-Indexing for Websites (March 2021)

This is not a new method as Google used it for years. It was the first introduced to solve the problem of people searching using their mobile. Before, Google indexes on the PC version. But it was later discovered that content on mobile and desktop are not alike, causing a mismatch in rankings.

As mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular, Google has resolved to use the mobile-first-indexing for websites. The mobile-first indexing makes a website version in the mobile form in Google’s database instead of the former PC version.

This helps to measure the amount of content and its relevance on mobile before displaying results. Now in March 2021, the mobile-first will be a default option for websites. This means the index and your content might change. We know that this is going to impact but we weren't sure yet. So we got to prepare. Congrats; Google presented the following guidelines to make indexing faster:

• Ensure clear visibility of the content of your site to the search engine crawlers and bots
• Ensure that you include all the required Meta tags on the mobile
• Make sure your page loads fast by enabling lazy loading
• Do not block any important URL that is mobile specific in your file
• Have identical content on both versions